May 28, 2008

Quality – characteristics; ability to satisfy stated or implied needs; conformance to requirements; fitness for use

Grade – a category or rank given to entities having the same functional use but use different technical characteristics. Determining and delivering the required levels of both quality and grade are the responsibilities of the Project Manager and project management team.

Quality assurance – monitor overall quality; provide confidence that the project will satisfy the relevant quality standards; through the project; internal and external.

Quality Control – measure specific quality

The quality assurance and control processes share the same inputs as the quality management plan and operational definitions, which are outputs of the quality planning. The work results and checklists are inputs to the quality control while the results of quality control measurements input to quality assurance. The outputs of both have quality improvement.

Cost of quality – tools of quality planning, prevention, appraisal, and failure (prevention, evaluation, repair) costs the the latter is broken down into internal and external costs; memeasurement and test equipment costs. Deming said “85% of the cost of quality are the direct responsibility of management”.

Metrics – operational definitions; output of quality planning; specify what and how to measure.

Quality inspection – attributes or measurements

Attribute sampling – result can either conform or not; fast; cheap; accurate

Variables sampling – result rated in a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity

AQL (acceptable quality level)- % limit to accept; AQL 5% in 100 means that among 100 tested, of no more than 5 unqualified are found it will be acceptable.

“Buyer’s Risk” – unqualified products are shipped to the customer as the result of sampling not being able to detect issues

“Seller’s Risk” – qualified products are rejected to ship to the customer as the result of sampling not treating the whole

In a control chart, the X is the mean value of the process data; X bar is the line. The Upper Control Limit (UCL) is 3* SD, the LCL (lower control limit is -3*SD.

R chart means the range chart. Usually the sample’s range is calculated and the R is the mean of the range. R bar is the line.

Usually the sample average ford not equal to the control average, X bar can be a calculated value or intentionally set up to manage the control.

“Rule of 7” – if there are 7 or more points in succession that are either above or below the mean value there is cause for concern about the process.

Special causes – unusual events; specific people operating; intermittent and unpredictable; output is not stable over time and unpredictable; output is not stable oer time and not predictable; all processes must be brought into statistical control by first detecting and removing the Special cause variation.

Common causes – system design; only corrected by the management; output distribution stable over time; no adjustment; normal process variables

Kaizen – continuous quality improvement; even the processes are operating without problem